Crossmatch®, a globally-recognized leader in biometric identity management and secure authentication solutions, today announced that it has been awarded a $5.8 million contract by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to develop next-generation Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) technologies for IARPA’s Thor program.

“Innovation has been a driving force within Crossmatch from the onset and IARPA’s Thor program will allow us to innovate and develop new technologies and solutions that surpass existing PAD systems,” said Crossmatch SVP-CTO Bill McClurg. “These solutions will drive new commercial opportunities and market demand, and Crossmatch is excited to have this opportunity to participate in the IARPA Thor program.”

Biometric PAs, also known as biometric spoofing, attempt to circumvent the protection of a biometric system by falsely representing biometric data in such a way as to gain access or avoid identification. The goal of the Thor program is to develop reliable PAD technologies not easily deceived when someone attempts to disguise their true biometric identity in order to game the system.

Although there are products that offer limited PAD technologies, they fall short when it comes to raising the entry barrier to known and unknown PAs. Crossmatch will work closely with IARPA, a research arm within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to develop a system capable of not only capturing more robust information from biometric samples that identify and measure the likelihood of PAs—but also identify unknown PAs based on factors like normalcy modeling for anomaly detection. Research and development will be ongoing through early 2021.